"Let no freedom be allowed to novelty, because it is not fitting that any addition should be made to antiquity. Let not the clear faith and belief of our forefathers be fouled by any muddy admixture."
-- Pope Sixtus III

Former Vice President Al Gore recently expressed his dismay for people who doubt the theory of global warming.

In a somewhat shocking rant, reported by the Web site Real Aspen, Gore railed against the tactics that global warming skeptics have used in the debate on climate change. Speaking at the Aspen Institute media forum "Networks an Citizenship," Gore pulled no punches, cursing numerous times in a speech that is quickly making rounds on the Internet.

After referencing how tobacco giants succeeded in delaying the implementation of the surgeon general's report for 40 years, Gore compared it to the current situation with climate change.

"That same model of media manipulation was transported whole cloth into the climate debate. And some of the exact same people -- I can go down a list of their names -- are involved in this. And so what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: 'This climate thing, it's nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn't trap heat. It may be volcanoes.'"

Gore then spouted off a couple of curse words that aren't for family friendly news sites such as IBTimes. He said these skeptics have polluted the debate and there's no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate, even though "the very existence of our civilization is threatened."

The Gorehound, chief Heat Nazi, prepares to probe his cranial cavity in search of brains in this file photo.

"People have no idea! It's no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the [expletive] word 'climate.' They have polluted it to the point where we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it," said Gore.

The former Vice President was originally at the Aspen Institute to talk about poverty, but spoke at a separate lunch for the institute's communications and society program, according to the Los Angeles Times. It was at this meeting, where he was supposed to talk about electronic public square and governance, that Gore went off.

Gore could be referencing a recent study from Roy Spencer, research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. science team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer. Spencer's recent study on climate change concluded the Earth is more efficient at releasing energy than models used to forecast climate change (like global warming) have led people to believe.

"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."

Using data from NASA's Terra Satellite, Spencer deducted that the climate system sheds energy more than three months before the typical warming event reaches its peak. When this is applied long-term, he said the climate isn't as sensitive to the carbon dioxide concentrations about which global warming scientists have theorized.

Other climate scientists were quick to dismiss Spencer's theory however. Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said the research's conclusion, didn't come with clear analysis. Others flat-out said it was a political ploy.

"It makes the skeptics feel good, it irritates the mainstream climate science community, but by this point, the debate over climate policy has nothing to do with science. It's essentially a debate over the role of government," surrounding issues of freedom versus regulation, Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M University of atmospheric sciences, told LiveScience.

In a comment, The Aspen Institute's spokesperson, Charlie Firestone said:

"Al Gore spoke and took questions for more than an hour in an informal session at the Aspen Institute FOCAS Conference on Aug. 4. The topic of the Forum was "Networks and Citizenship." His remarks ranged from the history of communications to current research in neuroscience to a discussion of contemporary politics.

One participant described it as "a tour de force of ideas expressed with humor, passion and insight." The session was arranged at the last minute as he was in Aspen to participate in another conference. He was unaware that the session was being taped, as most Aspen Institute policy meetings are off the record."

Here's the audio, kiddies. It is not appropriate for the littlest kiddies:

From the good folks at Human Events [who have been faithfully battling the dirty commie bastards for ages] comes this gem by Audrey Hudson that blows the Gorehound and the other Heat Nazis out of the frigid water.

Polar bears drowning in an Alaskan sea because the ice packs are melting—it’s the iconic image of the global warming debate.

But the validity of the science behind the image—presented as an ignoble testament to our environment in peril by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth—is now part of a federal investigation that has the environmental community on edge.

Special agents from the Interior Department’s inspector general's office are questioning the two government scientists about the paper they wrote on drowned polar bears, suggesting mistakes were made in the math and as to how the bears actually died, and the department is eyeing another study currently underway on bear populations.

Biologist Charles Monnett, the lead scientist on the paper, was placed on administrative leave July 18. Fellow biologist Jeffrey Gleason, who also contributed to the study, is being questioned, but has not been suspended.

The disputed paper was published by the journal Polar Biology in 2006, and suggests that the “drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open-water periods continues.”

It galvanized the environmental movement that led to the bear’s controversial listing in 2008 as threatened, and it is now protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Although the four dead bears cited in the paper were observed from 1,500 feet during flights over the Beaufort Sea, and the carcasses were never recovered or examined, Gleason told investigators it is likely the creatures drowned in a sudden windstorm that produced 30-knot winds, not for lack of an ice pack.

“We never mentioned global warming in the paper,” Gleason told the investigators, according to the transcript.

“But it’s inferred,” responded investigator Eric May. “That’s why the world took it up as a global warming tangent.”

Gleason told investigators that reaction to his and Monnett’s paper was overblown and spun out of context.

“I think these sorts of things tend to mushroom, and the interpretation gets popularized,” Gleason said. “Something very small turns into this big snowball coming down the mountain, and that's, I think, what happened with this paper.”

Gleason concedes that the study had a major impact on the controversial listing of the bear as an endangered species because of global warming.

“As a side note, talking about my former supervisor, he actually sent me an e-mail at one point saying, ‘You’re the reason polar bears got listed,’” Gleason said.

Monnett now manages $50 million in studies as part of his duties as a wildlife biologist with the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

Investigators are also examining Monnet’s procurement of one of those research studies on polar bears conducted by Canada's University of Alberta, as well as the “disclosure of personal relationships and preparation of the scope of work,” according to a July 29 memo from the Interior Department's inspector general’s office.

In particular, investigators are asking questions about the peer review work on Monnett’s drowned polar bear paper, which was done by his wife, Lisa Rotterman, as well as Andrew Derocher, the lead researcher on the Canadian study under review by the inspector general's office.

Monnett is being legally defended by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which posted the interviews the inspector general's office conducted with both scientists on its website.

PEER calls Monnett’s work “groundbreaking research,” and says the investigation is a political attempt to “impugn his observations on polar bears’ vulnerability to retreating sea ice.”

“With each interview, it becomes more outrageous that government funds are being spent on this crackpot probe while paying Dr. Monnett’s salary to sit at home,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER.

“This seven-page paper, which had undergone internal peer review, management review and outside peer review coordinated by journal editors, galvanized scientific and public appreciation for the profound effects that climate change may already be having in the Arctic,” PEER said in another statement in support of Monnett.

Eric Holder’s Justice Department has already declined to pursue any criminal prosecution in the probe, but the scientists still face possible administrative action for any wrongdoing, the inspector general said in the memo.

With investigators suggesting his research is collapsing, Monnett was defensive in the interview, and asked for the inspectors’ credentials to question his work or second-guess his calculations.

For example, there was some confusion as to whether it was three or four dead bears used in the calculation to determine the ratio of survival, and whether Monnett assumed that four swimming bears seen the week earlier were the same polar bears recorded as dead in the next survey. The statistic in question was the percentage of bears likely to survive when swimming in a storm—Monnett estimated it to be around 25%, whereas investigators put the number at more than 57%.

“Is there a potential we made a mistake, and the peer reviewers didn’t catch it? Possibly,” Gleason said.

If the scientists had reported the 57% figure, investigator May said, “how people were taking this and exaggerating the results, probably may not have happened in terms of the world taking your study as attributing [the drownings to] global warming.”

After nearly two hours of Monnett defending his work to investigators, Ruch from PEER asked the officials to explain what allegations are being made against Monnett.

May said they are examining the “wrong numbers,” “miscalculations” and “scientific misconduct.”

“I mean, that’s not—I mean, I mean, the level of criticism that they seem to have leveled here, scientific misconduct suggests that we did something deliberately to deceive or to change it,” Monnett said.

“I sure don’t see any indication of that in what you’re asking me about,” Monnett said.

The actual survey Monnett was conducting when he observed the dead bears in 2004 was the migration of bowhead whales. Investigators questioned how he later obtained data for a table listing live and dead polar bear sightings from 1987 to 2004.

“So how could you make the statement that no dead polar bears were observed” during that time period? May asked.

“Because we talked to the people that had flown the flights, and they would remember whether they had seen any dead polar bears,” Monnett said.

Asked whether he had any documentation to back that up, Monnett said that he did not.

“Science is about making the best case you can to test your hypothesis,” Monnett said. “You assemble your arguments and your data, you put it out there, and you see who’s going to knock it down.”

“And surprisingly, nobody, you know, knocked this down in any way. Everybody was just kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah, four dead polar bears. Okay, that’s kind of cool,’ ” Monnett said.

Dr. Rob Roy Ramey, a biologist who specializes in endangered species scientific issues for Wildlife Science International, Inc., reviewed Monnett’s paper as well as the inspector general's interviews for HUMAN EVENTS and said that the authors made unwarranted assumptions and large extrapolations based on a single event.

“They did not know if the polar bears actually drowned, they assumed that they had drowned. There were no statistical tests, just extrapolations made with no accounting for measurement error,” Ramey said.

“The paper gives the appearance that rigorous surveying was done for polar bears, when it was not,” Ramey said.

“They were flying at 1,500 feet with the purpose of looking for bowhead whales, which are much larger and easier to spot.”

Ramey also says he sees a conflict of interest for Monnett’s wife to be part of the internal peer review, and questioned the awarding of a contract to Derocher, who also participated in the peer review.

“That’s not impartial,” Ramey said. “It’s really important that peer review be truly independent. If they can’t be, then everyone has to state their conflict right up front.”

“I think it’s very illustrative of the problems with government research on endangered species, and raises the question as to whether government should be in the business of science,” Ramey said.

Numerous studies contributed to the bear’s listing as a protected species, including the paper on polar bear drowning, which was cited in the Federal Register’s proposed rule.

In making the announcement May 14, 2008, to protect the bear under the Endangered Species Act, the Interior Department said the listing “is based on the best available science, which shows the loss of sea ice threatens and will likely continue to threaten polar bear habitat.”

The Interior Department said it would modify regulatory language “to prevent abuse of this listing to erect a backdoor climate policy outside our normal system of political accountability.”

As part of the Endangered Species Act listing, the department said work would continue with scientists to monitor polar bear populations and trends, as well as the effects of oil and gas operations in the Beaufort Sea region.

“Power, money, authority and recognition come with listings on the endangered species list,” Ramey said.

Investigators conducted a second interview with Monnett on Tuesday. PEER said in a statement afterward that his “2006 peer-reviewed journal article on drowned polar bears remains the focus of the inquiry.”

Myron Ebell​, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said that the government is expected to “spend trillions of dollars to save the world from global warming on the basis of what a few scientists say.”

“There needs to be due diligence, and we need to challenge and investigate every single claim. The public expects that,” Ebell said. “But we find over and over that shoddy science has been put forward, and in some cases, dishonest and manipulated science, and they say, ‘Trust us,’ ” Ebell said.

Saint Mary of the Angels is truly beloved by the neighborhood but also well beyond. It is a visible landmark to all who travel the Kennedy Expressway northbound or southbound. A look to the west at the Armitage Avenue exit provides a wonderful view of our Dome (now encased with scaffolding) plus two elegant towers. You cannot help but notice the resplendent church when traveling from other neighborhoods on nearby city streets or parks. It is visited by many on architectural tours and has been called “the finest example of Roman Renaissance architecture in the country.” For over 100 years, Saint Mary of the Angels has sat as a sort of ‘gate’ between Chicago’s neighborhoods and the City’s business center, a constant and steady reminder of God’s presence in our everyday lives.

With a suitable storied past stretching over more than a century, St. Mary of the Angels has weathered many a harsh Chicago winter of blizzards, high winds and ice along with punishingly hot summers. It became one of the great preservation stories of Chicago’s history when, in 1988 it was slated for demolition. Citizens, historians, private donations, and finally the efforts of the priests of Opus Dei and parishioners all worked together to save the Church.

Once again the Church is in need of significant repairs and renovations.

Funds are needed now to:

Repair the dome

Repair and plaster inside of church damaged by dome leakage

Rebuild the parapet

Renovate the South Tower

The cost of the work is upwards of $3.2 million (and possibly more for new-found North Tower falling debris.) We have raised nearly $900,000 to date. Please help restore this architectural gem serving Chicagoans daily.

Dome Campaign: Restore God's House

Click here to learn how YOU can help the dome!

About The Campaign: A Letter To Parishioners and Friends

Fr. Charles, Fr. Hilary and Fr. Joe

Dear Parishioners and Friends of St. Mary of the Angels,

What an honor and privilege to serve God and His people in such a beautiful setting. Those who came before us offered their very best to give us this exquisite church – with 26 angels faithfully watching from above. It is hard to imagine that, less than 25 years ago, this structure was closed and faced an uncertain future. Thankfully, God and the people of St. Mary of the Angels had other ideas in mind for this truly sacred space.

Through hard work, sacrifice and determination, our church underwent a major restoration from 1991 to 1999. Since then, the number of registered parishioners has consistently continued to increase. Each week we have 17 regularly scheduled masses and offer 16 hours for confessions. Our church is the perfect place for quiet meditation, prayerful reflection and joyous praise. Our hope is to provide this safe, warm and inviting sanctuary for many years to come. Once again, we must first answer the call to Christian stewardship as we address vitally needed repairs and maintenance.

As you read about the pressing issues facing our parish, please take a moment to consider what St. Mary of the Angels – and your faith – means to you. The next time you attend Mass, look around you. Then lift your eyes upward to read the words inscribed at the base of the inner dome: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to men of good will!” Together let us Restore God’s House and proclaim His glory for years to come.

The angels that surround the dome of St. Mary of the Angels Church are a part of the daily routine of many Chicagoans, even if they are not sure what they are or why they’re there. As they commute on the Kennedy Expressway, people cannot help but notice the beautiful church building at the Armitage Avenue exit. For more than one hundred years, St. Mary of the Angels has sat as a sort of “gate” between Chicago’s neighborhoods and the City’s business center, a constant reminder of God’s presence in our everyday lives.

Since my return to Chicago in 1997, I have had the opportunity to visit St. Mary of the Angels Parish on a number of occasions. Each time I walk through the doors of St. Mary of the Angels, a special atmosphere of warmth and hospitality is evident. I am consistently inspired by the architecture of the church – the magnificent altar and stained glass windows, along with the glorious dome and beautiful paintings that together lift one’s mind and heart to God. The early parishioners of St. Mary of the Angels sacrificed considerably to build a church that would serve as a fitting place for worship and a source of pride for the Bucktown neighborhood.

As the current parishioners of St. Mary of the Angels, you have been faced with many facility challenges but, even when it was necessary to close the church building for a time for safety’s sake, you never gave up on the parish you love. I am very grateful to the prelature of Opus Dei for assuming responsibility for St. Mary of the Angles in 1991 and for faithfully staffing the parish since that time. Now, having survived more than a century of Chicago winters, the church is again in need of significant repairs and renovations. By working together to Restore God’s House, you will keep the doors of St. Mary of the Angels open for decades to come.

Thank you for your lives of faith and for your willingness to help your parish maintain its presence here for years to come. You and those you love are in my prayers; please keep me in yours.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

he NASA Mars rover Opportunity has gained a view of Endeavour crater from barely more than a football-field's distance away from the rim. The rim of Endeavour has been the mission's long-term goal since mid-2008.

Endeavour offers the setting for plenty of productive work by Opportunity. The crater is 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter -- more than 25 times wider than Victoria crater, an earlier stop that Opportunity examined for two years. Observations by orbiting spacecraft indicate that the ridges along Endeavour's western rim expose rock outcrops older than any Opportunity has seen so far. The selected location for arrival at the rim, "Spirit Point," is at the southern tip of one of those ridges, "Cape York," on the western side of Endeavour.

Opportunity and Spirit completed their three-month prime missions on Mars in April 2004. Both rovers continued for years of bonus, extended missions. Both have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life. The mission of the Spirit rover, for which Spirit Point was named, was concluded in May, 2011, after the rover did not re-establish communications following the Martian winter.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. More information about the rovers is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/rovers .

The purpose of the New Jersey's Mission of Honor for Cremains of American Veterans is to locate, identify and inter the orphaned and abandoned cremains of American veterans through the joint efforts of Veteran Organizations throughout New Jersey. To provide honor and respect to those who have served this country in time of peace and conflict.

Our Objectives:

New Jersey's Mission of Honor is a state wide effort to inter the orphaned and abandoned Veteran cremains.

Cremains?Sorry, but that is just awkward and creepy.

This task will be executed through the combined efforts of veteran organizations throughout New Jersey. Local, state and national laws must be followed in the identification, claiming process and proper interment of the unclaimed remains of orphaned and abandoned veterans. Local funeral homes, crematoriums, hospitals, senior homes, veteran homes and prisons will be participating in this project.

The Department of Military And Veterans Affairs will assist in identifying the orphaned and abandoned veteran cremains along with interring the cremains at the General Doyle State Veterans' Cemetery. Also the Veterans Administration will be helping to determine the cremain status for interment.

This will be a lengthy project and will require many man-hours to ensure that we have done our utmost to discover every forgotten veteran in New Jersey and procure each a dignified resting place. This will also be a labor of love, a task of redemption, for a debt of service that can never be repaid.

The New Jersey Mission of Honor will consist of a network of individuals working with local Funeral Homes, State, and National Agencies to ensure that, from now on, the cremated remains of any unclaimed veteran will be identified, claimed and interred in a timely manner. This will be an ongoing project and is a cooperative effort between many voluntary service organizations.

The New Jersey Mission of Honor will be a long-term project, but not a time sensitive project. Our hope is to identify and inter every orphaned and abandoned veteran.

This endeavor is a labor of love and respect. For those of you who would like to make a donation to this project please mail to:

New Jersey’s Mission of Honor for Cremains of American Veterans at

P.O. Box 149

Lodi, NJ 07644

.

With just a $100.00 donation we would be able to purchase a urn to honorably inter these war veterans. The corresponding military branch of the service will be placed on each urn for each veteran cremain that the Mission inters.

The happiest man in the wake of the failure of the public sector union backed effort to seize the Wisconsin state senate for the Democratic Party is Scott Walker, that state's Republicangovernor, swept into power in the 2010 midterm elections.

Walker, whose reforms that curbed the power of public sector unions to collectively bargain, has been the object of hate by unions that represent government bureaucrats. Twice, the public sector unions have tried to punish Walker, in a special election for a state Supreme Court justice and now in a recall election in which three Republicans in the state senate needed to be knocked off, but only two were.

Having struck at the King twice and failed to kill him, Walker's enemies are mulling over the possibility of a third try, a recall election against the governor himself, timed it is hoped to coincide with the 2012 election. The idea that such a recall election would drive Democrats to the polls, hopefully knocking off Walker and delivering the state for Obama.

There is, as one might imagine, a fly in that ointment. Obama himself is a grave jeopardy of losing the 2012 presidential election. A bad economy, the S&P downgrade, and persistent unemployment have combined to create Obama fatigue. There is a growing sense that the man may not be up to the job of governing the United States.

Thus, it may well be that the 2012 election will drive Republicans and independents to the polls in Wisconsin, not only denying that state to Obama, but confirming Walker in office.

Walker can, after all, contrast his performance to that of Obama's, closing rather widening budget deficits, holding the line on taxes, reforming government. Walker's approval numbers may be low at the current time, but when the realization sets in about how splendid his reforms have performed, he may well be unbeatable.

The dream candidate to run against Walker, former Sen. Russ Feingold, must be mulling those considerations. Feingold has already been rejected by the people of Wisconsin by virtue of having lost his senate seat in 2010. Another state-wide election failure would further taint his brand. Feingold, who is also mentioned as a possible primary opponent for Obama by liberals discontented with the president's failure to enact their entire agenda, may just one to sit this one out.

On Monday, August 8, Governor Jerry Brown finally signed a bill the California state legislature had passed in July—a bill that binds California to “National Popular Vote” (NPV). Which is to say, to the committing of all its electoral college votes in a presidential election to the winner of the nation’s popular vote. In other words, regardless of which candidate carried California, the electors are directed to vote for the candidate who carries the nation.

It’s always been something of a nutty idea, probably unconstitutional and certainly contrary to the Founders’ notion of elections. [Emphasis mine. - F.G.] It would encourage third party regional and favorite son candidates, while increasing the cost of elections. Besides, it lacks enforcement mechanisms to keep faithless electors from voting whichever way they please—and it would probably create slews of such electors. Attempts, like this one, to make end runs around the Constitution always have unintended consequences, and if the proposal ended up influencing the election, it would almost certainly end up at the Supreme Court, which isn’t, under our electoral scheme, supposed to decide elections.

Not that we’re in immediate danger. The NPV proposal doesn’t go into effect until the sum total of the electoral college votes of the states which have enacted the proposal reach the necessary total of votes for victory in the electoral college. That’s currently 270 votes, and California’s 55 electoral votes, when added to those of the seven other states and the District of Columbia which have passed similar legislation, bring the current NPV total to only 142.

But Kate Havard’s story on Obama’s electoral vulnerabilities—“Nine Is Enough,” in THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s current issue—gets one to thinking. The impulse behind the National Popular Vote proposal is, of course, the 2000 election, in which the once-plausible Al Gore (remember when Gore seemed, like, a relatively sane person?) won the popular vote but lost the electoral college and thus the presidency.

The proposal has some Republican supporters—Fred Thompson used to stump about it—but the California bill, like those in most of the other states, was pushed forwarded and passed by Democrats. People, in other words, who’ve never quite gotten over Florida in 2000.

So, what would happen to California’s electors if we have enough states passing the proposal by 2012?

At a guess, based on the states in Harvard’s story, there’s at least a small chance that California’s 55 electoral college votes would push the Republican candidate over the top. The votes, one assumes, of a state that otherwise would be carried by the Democratic candidate.

The 34-year-old rapper known for his outbursts was the headline act at the Big Chill music festival Saturday night, where he ranted in the middle of his set about being misunderstood and underappreciated.

"I walk through the hotel and I walk down the street, and people look at me like I'm (expletive) insane, like I'm Hitler," he said. "One day the light will shine through and one day people will understand everything I ever did."

West received light boos from the crowd as a result.

The performer also defended the music video for his song "Monster," which features cannibalism and girls hanging from their necks.

"Who saw the video before it got banned, before they took it down and before women's groups starting saying that a person that lost the most important woman in his life is now against women in some way?" asked West, referring to the 2007 death of his mother Donda West.

West, who started his set roughly 30-minutes late, apologized to the crowd for his tardiness, saying he needed to make sure his performance was great.

"Michael Jordan changed so much in basketball, he took his power to make a difference. It's so much (expletive) going on in music right now and somebody has to make a (expletive) difference," he said.

The multiplatinum-seller is known for his outspokenness, most notably his diss toward Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, where he grabbed the microphone from her as she accepted the award for best female video and said Beyonce should have won it. In 2005 he said "George Bush doesn't care about black people" during a Hurricane Katrina telethon.

At the music festival, West talked about some of his awards show drama, saying some of his sponsorships were canceled as a result.

But West closed his show on a positive note by paying tribute to Amy Winehouse.

West, who said he met the late singer a few years ago during Paris fashion week, played snippets of Winehouse's "Tears Dry On Their Own" and "Back to Black." He said it was "beautiful" to meet the performer and that she was "amazing."

Then, in Kanye fashion, he began to rant.

"Thank you for protecting your artists that are still here," he said to the crowd. "This is for McQueen, for Amy, for Michael and for all the media, can you lighten up on all your artists that are still here?" he asked, receiving a roaring cheer from the crowd and leaving the stage with his 3-man band and 20-something backup dancers.

Nutter, who is African American, targeted so-called flash mobs of black youths who’ve been caught on video attacking people in downtown Philadelphia. “If you want…anybody else to respect you and not be afraid when they see you walking down the street,” he said from the pulpit at Mount Carmel Baptist Church, “then leave the innocent people who are walking down the street minding their own damn business. Leave them alone.”

Nutter’s chastisements—which didn’t spare parents, either—included:

“Take those God darn hoodies down, especially in the summer. Pull your pants up and buy a belt ’cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt. Nobody.”

“If you walk into somebody’s office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won’t hire you? They don’t hire you ’cause you look like you’re crazy!”

“The Immaculate Conception of our Lord Jesus Christ took place a long time ago, and it didn’t happen here in Philadelphia. So every one of these kids has two parents who were around and participating at the time. They need to be around now.”

“Parents who neglect their children, who don’t know where they are, who don‘t know what they’re doing, who don‘t know who they’re hanging out with, you’re going to find yourself spending some quality time with your kids in jail.”

To fathers: “If you’re not providing the guidance,and you’re not sending any money, you’re just a sperm donor.”

Nutter announced yesterday that the certain areas of center city Philadelphia are now off limits to minors after 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. As for the rest of the city, the curfew remains 10 p.m. if you’re under 13; midnight if you’re under 18.

Take a look at your future, kiddies. It consists of the victims of communism burning and looting and battling the police. Then other victims of communism [called rightists or vigilantes] will take to the streets to battle the first group.

Or do you think it couldn't possibly happen here? Pay attention to Mr. Max Hastings. He knows exactly what killed his country.

A few weeks after the U.S. city of Detroit was ravaged by 1967 race riots in which 43 people died, I was shown around the wrecked areas by a black reporter named Joe Strickland.

He said: ‘Don’t you believe all that stuff people here are giving media folk about how sorry they are about what happened. When they talk to each other, they say: “It was a great fire, man!” ’

I am sure that is what many of the young rioters, black and white, who have burned and looted in England through the past few shocking nights think today.

It was fun. It made life interesting. It got people to notice them. As a girl looter told a BBC reporter, it showed ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like’.

If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.

Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped.

They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries.

They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.

They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.

Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no one even shot them for it.

A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the ‘feral children’ on his patch — another way of describing the same reality.

The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist.

Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything, least of all Britain or their community. They do not watch royal weddings or notice Test matches or take pride in being Londoners or Scousers or Brummies.

Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present.

They have their being only in video games and street-fights, casual drug use and crime, sometimes petty, sometimes serious.

The notions of doing a nine-to-five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids, taking up DIY or learning to read properly, are beyond their imaginations.

Last week, I met a charity worker who is trying to help a teenage girl in East London to get a life for herself. There is a difficulty, however: ‘Her mother wants her to go on the game.’ My friend explained: ‘It’s the money, you know.’

An underclass has existed throughout history, which once endured appalling privation. Its spasmodic outbreaks of violence, especially in the early 19th century, frightened the ruling classes.

Its frustrations and passions were kept at bay by force and draconian legal sanctions, foremost among them capital punishment and transportation to the colonies.

Today, those at the bottom of society behave no better than their forebears, but the welfare state has relieved them from hunger and real want.

When social surveys speak of ‘deprivation’ and ‘poverty’, this is entirely relative. Meanwhile, sanctions for wrongdoing have largely vanished.

When Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith recently urged employers to take on more British workers and fewer migrants, he was greeted with a hoarse laugh.

Every firm in the land knows that an East European — for instance — will, first, bother to turn up; second, work harder; and third, be better-educated than his or her British counterpart.Who do we blame for this state of affairs?

Ken Livingstone, contemptible as ever, declares the riots to be a result of the Government’s spending cuts. This recalls the remarks of the then leader of Lambeth Council, ‘Red Ted’ Knight, who said after the 1981 Brixton riots that the police in his borough ‘amounted to an army of occupation’.

But it will not do for a moment to claim the rioters’ behaviour reflects deprived circumstances or police persecution.

Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school, live in decent homes, eat meals at regular hours or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang.

This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect.

It is because it is fantastically hard to help such people, young or old, without imposing a measure of compulsion which modern society finds unacceptable. These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything different or better.

A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.

John Stuart Mill wrote in his great 1859 essay On Liberty: ‘The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.’

Yet every day up and down the land, this vital principle of civilised societies is breached with impunity.

Anyone who reproaches a child, far less an adult, for discarding rubbish, making a racket, committing vandalism or driving unsociably will receive in return a torrent of obscenities, if not violence.

So who is to blame? The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass.

The social engineering industry unites to claim that the conventional template of family life is no longer valid.

And what of the schools? I do not think they can be blamed for the creation of a grotesquely self-indulgent, non-judgmental culture.

This has ultimately been sanctioned by Parliament, which refuses to accept, for instance, that children are more likely to prosper with two parents than with one, and that the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing.

The judiciary colludes with social services and infinitely ingenious lawyers to assert the primacy of the rights of the criminal and aggressor over those of law-abiding citizens, especially if a young offender is involved.

The police, in recent years, have developed a reputation for ignoring yobbery and bullying, or even for taking the yobs’ side against complainants.

‘The problem,’ said Bill Pitt, the former head of Manchester’s Nuisance Strategy Unit, ‘is that the law appears to be there to protect the rights of the perpetrator, and does not support the victim.’

Police regularly arrest householders who are deemed to have taken ‘disproportionate’ action to protect themselves and their property from burglars or intruders. The message goes out that criminals have little to fear from ‘the feds’.

Figures published earlier this month show that a majority of ‘lesser’ crimes — which include burglary and car theft, and which cause acute distress to their victims — are never investigated, because forces think it so unlikely they will catch the perpetrators.

How do you inculcate values in a child whose only role model is footballer Wayne Rooney — a man who is bereft of the most meagre human graces?

How do you persuade children to renounce bad language when they hear little else from stars on the BBC?

A teacher, Francis Gilbert, wrote five years ago in his book Yob Nation: ‘The public feels it no longer has the right to interfere.’

Discussing the difficulties of imposing sanctions for misbehaviour or idleness at school, he described the case of a girl pupil he scolded for missing all her homework deadlines.

The youngster’s mother, a social worker, telephoned him and said: ‘Threatening to throw my daughter off the A-level course because she hasn’t done some work is tantamount to psychological abuse, and there is legislation which prevents these sorts of threats.

‘I believe you are trying to harm my child’s mental well-being, and may well take steps . . . if you are not careful.’

That story rings horribly true. It reflects a society in which teachers have been deprived of their traditional right to arbitrate pupils’ behaviour. Denied power, most find it hard to sustain respect, never mind control.

I never enjoyed school, but, like most children until very recent times, did the work because I knew I would be punished if I did not. It would never have occurred to my parents not to uphold my teachers’ authority. This might have been unfair to some pupils, but it was the way schools functioned for centuries, until the advent of crazy ‘pupil rights’.

I recently received a letter from a teacher who worked in a county’s pupil referral unit, describing appalling difficulties in enforcing discipline. Her only weapon, she said, was the right to mark a disciplinary cross against a child’s name for misbehaviour.

Having repeatedly and vainly asked a 15-year-old to stop using obscene language, she said: ‘Fred, if you use language like that again, I’ll give you a cross.’

He replied: ‘Give me an effing cross, then!’ Eventually, she said: ‘Fred, you have three crosses now. You must miss your next break.’

He answered: ‘I’m not missing my break, I’m going for an effing fag!’ When she appealed to her manager, he said: ‘Well, the boy’s got a lot going on at home at the moment. Don’t be too hard on him.’

This is a story repeated daily in schools up and down the land.

A century ago, no child would have dared to use obscene language in class. Today, some use little else. It symbolises their contempt for manners and decency, and is often a foretaste of delinquency.

If a child lacks sufficient respect to address authority figures politely, and faces no penalty for failing to do so, then other forms of abuse — of property and person — come naturally.

So there we have it: a large, amoral, brutalised sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable. They are too idle to accept work waitressing or doing domestic labour, which is why almost all such jobs are filled by immigrants.

They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally, and small chance of being punished if they do so.

They have no sense of responsibility for themselves, far less towards others, and look to no future beyond the next meal, sexual encounter or TV football game.

They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions. Liberal opinion holds they are victims, because society has failed to provide them with opportunities to develop their potential.

Most of us would say this is nonsense. Rather, they are victims of a perverted social ethos, which elevates personal freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline — tough love — which alone might enable some of its members to escape from the swamp of dependency in which they live.

Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way out for these people.

They are products of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.

Unless or until those who run Britain introduce incentives for decency and impose penalties for bestiality which are today entirely lacking, there will never be a shortage of young rioters and looters such as those of the past four nights, for whom their monstrous excesses were ‘a great fire, man’.

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

The Federal Reserve said on Tuesday it will keep its hefty monetary policy stimulus for at least another two years, an effort to support a flagging economy and fragile global markets that faced considerable internal dissent.

It was unclear whether the decision, which involved no new commitment of funds for bond purchases, would be enough to put a floor on a U.S. stock market that has fallen more than 15 percent in the last two weeks.

The Fed said U.S. economic growth was proving considerably weaker than expected, suggesting inflation, which has already moderated recently, will remain contained for the foreseeable future.

Three officials, Richard Fisher of the Dallas Fed, Narayana Kocherlakota of Minneapolis and Charles Plosser of Philadelphia, voted against the move.

"The committee currently anticipates that economic conditions -- including low rates of resource utilization and a subdued outlook for inflation over the medium run -- are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate at least through mid-2013," the U.S. central bank said in a statement.

It also reiterated its policy of reinvesting the proceeds from bonds maturing in its portfolio, though it did not state a specific time frame for such actions.

The Fed's decision comes with financial markets in turmoil as worries escalate about heightened risks to the global economy after an embarrassing downgrade of U.S. debt. In addition, fears remain that European efforts to put a safety net under heavily indebted Italy and Spain may not suffice to avert wider credit market disruptions.

In an attempt to tamp down market volatility, finance ministers and central bankers of the Group of Seven major world economies issued a statement on Sunday after a global telephone conference saying they were ready to act to ensure stability.

U.S. stocks were up on Tuesday ahead of the FOMC announcement but suffered their worse drop since the financial crisis this week.

Analysts attribute the sell-off to a pileup of bad news, including weak U.S. economic growth of less than one percent in the first half of 2011, the debt crisis in Europe and the rancorous debt limit standoff in Washington that pushed the United States perilously closely to a debt default.

Officials had been pinning hopes for an acceleration of U.S. growth in the second half of the year on a healing of supply chain disruptions from Japan's natural disasters, a calming of debt woes in Europe as governments committed to more sustainable fiscal paths, and steady gains in business and consumer confidence in the United States.

But those expectations, along with the Fed's forecast for a growth rate of between 2.7 percent and 2.9 percent in 2011, have appeared increasingly over-optimistic in recent weeks.

While there were modestly encouraging signs in hard-hit labor markets in July, the unemployment rate remained lofty at 9.1 percent. Other economic reports have pointed to weak manufacturing and sluggish consumer spending.

A Reuters poll showed analysts now see a one in four chance the U.S. economy will slip back into recession. Two weeks ago, economists saw the chances of another recession as one-in-five.

Economists also cut their forecasts for third-quarter growth to an annualized 2.3 percent from 3.1 percent in the July poll.

In her autobiography, Helen Gahagan Douglas recalled telling President Franklin D. Roosevelt about her visits to the camps of migrant workers. She was especially poignant about the children and their lack of Christmas toys when the president tried to stop her.

“Don't tell me any more, Helen,” FDR told the woman who is probably best known for losing a dirty Senate race to Richard Nixon. She was stunned. Roosevelt was crying.

Can anyone imagine Barack Obama doing anything similar? The answer — at least my answer — is no. And this is quite amazing when you think about it. FDR was a Hudson River squire — down to his cigarette holder and cape. Nonetheless, he could connect to the less fortunate. Obama, in contrast, was raised in the great American muddle, not rich and not poor. Yet when the stock market fell more than 500 points last week and the image that night was of the president whooping it up at his birthday party, the juxtaposition — just bad timing, of course — seemed appropriate. He does not seem to care.

This quality of Obama's, this inability to communicate what many of us think he must be feeling, has lately cost many trees their dear lives — reams of essays and op-ed pieces. One of the more interesting ones, by Drew Westen, a psychology professor at Emory University, ran in Sunday's New York Times. It cited Obama's frequent inability or unwillingness to explain himself or to appear empathetic. All this is true. But Westen's most salient point was contained in the title: “What Happened to Obama?” The answer: Nothing.

Obama has always been the man he is today. He is the very personification of cognitive dissonance — the gap between what we (especially liberals) expected of the first serious African-American presidential candidate and the man he in fact is. He has next to none of the rhetorical qualities of the old-time black politicians. He would eschew the cliche, but he feels little of their pain. In this sense, he has been patronized by liberals who looked at a man and saw black and has been reviled by those who looked at a black man and saw “other.”

Westen faults Obama for his lack of storytelling abilities. But this is because Obama is himself the story. Consider for a moment that Obama's account of how he had to fight to get medical coverage for his dying mother is not exactly true. The White House's response to this revelation was grudging silence. It did not dispute the story, and it soon died. This was because the Obama story is not what he says but who he is. That remains unchanged, and so the very people who would pummel a Republican for such a mischaracterization were silent about Obama's. Obama did not deign to reply. He does not have to.

Obama's communications handicap, his loathing for the pornography of politics, could cost him a second term. In the current New York Review of Books, Andrew Hacker cites the findings of the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato to point out that “an usually high proportion” of Obama's 2008 majority came from new voters, “notably students and minorities.” If a large number of these Obama voters are no longer elated by the historic novelty of the candidate and/or are disappointed by his performance, then turnout will be depressed and Obama will be in peril. The passion of his haters is fearsome; his admirers cannot be tepid.

Only the GOP can save Obama. His political shortcomings cannot be fixed because he is who he is. He can rely on running against a party that has the soul of an actuarial table and will cut programs that the poor and the middle class adore.

Whoever that Republican candidate may be, he or she will be stuck in the amber of the early primaries and caucuses where extremism runs rampant and moderates go to die. Neither Jon Huntsman nor Mitt Romney has so far shown the political dexterity to squiggle out of the box that is the Iowa or South Carolina contests.

Obama is the very soul of common sense. As he talks, I nod my head in agreement. Mostly, I think, he has done the right thing. But I doubt anyone will ever recount how he cried in the Oval Office any more than I can recall a soaring passage from a speech. This president got elected because he was cool. He could be defeated because he is cold.

Wow. Richie can chug Kool-Aid and lick boots while covering his backside all at the same time.

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee.

The dramatic and unabashedly negative turn is the product of political reality. Obama remains personally popular, but pluralities in recent polling disapprove of his handling of his job, and Americans fear the country is on the wrong track. His aides are increasingly resigned to running for reelection in a glum nation. And so the candidate who ran on “hope” in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent.

n a move that will make some Democrats shudder, Obama’s high command has even studied former President George W. Bush’s 2004 takedown of Sen. John Kerry, a senior campaign adviser told POLITICO, for clues on how a president with middling approval ratings can defeat a challenger.

“Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney,” said a prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House.

The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”

“First, they’ve got to like you, and there’s not a lot to like about Mitt Romney,” said Chicago Democratic consultant Pete Giangreco, who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign. “There’s no way to hide this guy and hide his innate phoniness.”

A senior Obama adviser was even more cutting, suggesting that the Republican’s personal awkwardness will turn off voters.

“There’s a weirdness factor with Romney, and it remains to be seen how he wears with the public,” the adviser said, noting that the contrasts they’d drive between the president and the former Massachusetts governor would be “based on character to a great extent.”

The second aspect of the campaign to define Romney is his record as CEO of Bain Capital, a venture capital firm that was responsible for both creating and eliminating jobs. Obama officials intend to frame Romney as the very picture of greed in the great recession — a sort of political Gordon Gekko.

“He was very, very good at making a profit for himself and his partners but not nearly as good [at] saving jobs for communities,” said David Axelrod, the president’s chief strategist. “His is very much the profile of what we’ve seen in the last decade on Wall Street. He was about making money. And that’s fine. But often times, he made it at the expense of jobs in communities.”

Romney officials shrug off the tough talk, arguing that there’s nothing Obama can do that will turn the campaign away from functioning as a referendum on his stewardship of the economy.

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

Hey, Paul! That "hostage" stuff is really hurtful to Rep. Giffords and millions of Americans who think you're a dumbass who wants to kill everyone who gets in your boy's [Racist.] way.

As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

That's what Dumbo the Presiphant [An Asian presiphant, of course. An African presiphant would be racist.] says. Herr Krugmann must have missed the last politburo meeting.

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Stop, Paul! You're killing us!

The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

"Cult of Balance"? How about the "Cult of Personality" that has you inches away from imprisoning or shooting Americans who dare to exercise their true First Amendment rights [Political speech, kiddies, not porn or shouting "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater.], you left-fascist goon?

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. As you may know, President Obama initially tried to strike a “Grand Bargain” with Republicans over taxes and spending. To do so, he not only chose not to make an issue of G.O.P. extortion, he offered extraordinary concessions on Democratic priorities: an increase in the age of Medicare eligibility, sharp spending cuts and only small revenue increases. As The Times’s Nate Silver pointed out, Mr. Obama effectively staked out a position that was not only far to the right of the average voter’s preferences, it was if anything a bit to the right of the average Republican voter’s preferences.

But Republicans rejected the deal. So what was the headline on an Associated Press analysis of that breakdown in negotiations? “Obama, Republicans Trapped by Inflexible Rhetoric.” A Democratic president who bends over backward to accommodate the other side — or, if you prefer, who leans so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling over — is treated as being just the same as his utterly intransigent opponents. Balance!

Which brings me to those “centrist” fantasies.

Many pundits view taking a position in the middle of the political spectrum as a virtue in itself. I don’t. Wisdom doesn’t necessarily reside in the middle of the road, and I want leaders who do the right thing, not the centrist thing.

But for those who insist that the center is always the place to be, I have an important piece of information: We already have a centrist president. Indeed, Bruce Bartlett, who served as a policy analyst in the Reagan administration, argues that Mr. Obama is in practice a moderate conservative.

Mr. Bartlett has a point. The president, as we’ve seen, was willing, even eager, to strike a budget deal that strongly favored conservative priorities. His health reform was very similar to the reform Mitt Romney installed in Massachusetts. Romneycare, in turn, closely followed the outlines of a plan originally proposed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. And returning tax rates on high-income Americans to their level during the Roaring Nineties is hardly a socialist proposal.

True, Republicans insist that Mr. Obama is a leftist seeking a government takeover of the economy, but they would, wouldn’t they? The facts, should anyone choose to report them, say otherwise.

So what’s with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it’s coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it’s not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

Wow. This is out and out First Stage Stalinism, kiddies: Bully the press into brain-washing the stupid peasants to make them them your willing slaves and accomplices in Stage Two Stalinism, which involves exterminating the opposition.

In case you're wondering, Stage Three Stalinism is the random [Yes, it must appear to be almost completely random and senseless. That is most terrifying.] mass murder of your supporters and the non-political class because terror is a very effective form of social control."Ha-ha! Fyodor, you silly goose, that can't happen here!"

Yo, Pauly! Your boy [Racist.] Hussein Hussein Okhrana is the one who said a downgrade would bring Obamageddon. What's up with that?

On one hand, there is a case to be made that the madness of the right has made America a fundamentally unsound nation. And yes, it is the madness of the right: if not for the extremism of anti-tax Republicans, we would have no trouble reaching an agreement that would ensure long-run solvency. [All emphasis mine. - F. G.]

About Me

First of all, the word is SEX, not GENDER. If you are ever tempted to use the word GENDER, don't. The word is SEX! SEX! SEX! SEX! For example: "My sex is male." is correct.
"My gender is male." means nothing. Look it up.
What kind of sick neo-Puritan nonsense is this? Idiot left-fascists, get your blood-soaked paws off the English language. Hence I am choosing "male" under protest.